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December 17, 2012

mistakes you don't have to make

it really is amazing how wrong everybody got the story, in virtually every respect. they misidentified the shooter as his brother. for like 24 hours everyone was asserting with complete assurance that his mother was a kindergarten teacher at sandy hook. then they said he went there as a student. all that is wrong. they said he left the assault rifle in his car and fired all the shots with handguns; now all the shots came from the bushmaster, and so on. now, in any particular case, maybe it's the police who are giving the wrong info or maybe it's the media developing it independently. and of course, reporters are human and will make mistakes. but i say that they can and should do better than that. i'm impatient too, but you really do need to take deep breath and think about sourcing, confirmation, etc.

the familiar problem gathers: everyone wants to know what's going on, wants to participate in some wise in the mourning. so all media gather and engage in saturation coverage. the town becomes a kind of truman show or something. after the fortieth time they put on a psychiatrist to tell you how to talk to your kids or pay tribute to the victims, you begin to lose the emotional thread and participate in a media spectacle. the more attention they bring and the more they insist on telling the story, the further it starts to recede into a kind of fiction, with a kind of pre-determined narrative shape: the heroes, the community pulling together, etc. not that any of that is exactly false, but one begins to experience it as though it were a fictional narrative: they want to construct it that way for us and it attenuates the immediacy in a way that both helps everyone turn a corner, and puts the thing away somewhere where we have it contained. the narrative form requires some sort of resolution, and that requires at a minimum a process of systematic simplification. again you lose the excess, where the reality of an event like that enters into our experience: the moment where you can't face up that is the real response.

after awhile you start to worry that you want to watch people in pain as a kind of entertainment. you're getting it right where you get your sports and romcoms. you start to doubt the sincerity of the anchors' and politicians' formulaic emoting. you start to doubt your own.

Comments

mistakes you don't have to make

it really is amazing how wrong everybody got the story, in virtually every respect. they misidentified the shooter as his brother. for like 24 hours everyone was asserting with complete assurance that his mother was a kindergarten teacher at sandy hook. then they said he went there as a student. all that is wrong. they said he left the assault rifle in his car and fired all the shots with handguns; now all the shots came from the bushmaster, and so on. now, in any particular case, maybe it's the police who are giving the wrong info or maybe it's the media developing it independently. and of course, reporters are human and will make mistakes. but i say that they can and should do better than that. i'm impatient too, but you really do need to take deep breath and think about sourcing, confirmation, etc.

the familiar problem gathers: everyone wants to know what's going on, wants to participate in some wise in the mourning. so all media gather and engage in saturation coverage. the town becomes a kind of truman show or something. after the fortieth time they put on a psychiatrist to tell you how to talk to your kids or pay tribute to the victims, you begin to lose the emotional thread and participate in a media spectacle. the more attention they bring and the more they insist on telling the story, the further it starts to recede into a kind of fiction, with a kind of pre-determined narrative shape: the heroes, the community pulling together, etc. not that any of that is exactly false, but one begins to experience it as though it were a fictional narrative: they want to construct it that way for us and it attenuates the immediacy in a way that both helps everyone turn a corner, and puts the thing away somewhere where we have it contained. the narrative form requires some sort of resolution, and that requires at a minimum a process of systematic simplification. again you lose the excess, where the reality of an event like that enters into our experience: the moment where you can't face up that is the real response.

after awhile you start to worry that you want to watch people in pain as a kind of entertainment. you're getting it right where you get your sports and romcoms. you start to doubt the sincerity of the anchors' and politicians' formulaic emoting. you start to doubt your own.